Posted
by
samzenpuson Thursday November 25, 2010 @09:55AM
from the new-way-of-doing-things dept.

EMB Numbers writes "Sony has revealed that the new SNAP development environment for 'consumer electronics' is based on Objective-C and the open source GNUstep implementation of Apple's Openstep spec. While Apple has continued to update their specification in the form of Cocoa and Mac OS X, GNUstep has preserved the original standard. Anyone familiar with Cocoa Touch and iOS will feel right at home developing for Sony. There may even be some source code compatibility between the platforms. The world continues to chase apple — probably for the better."

It will be interesting to see if Apple respond to this and how. My feeling is that they might try and protect their assets and restrict developers' options. I haven't really thught this through but I just can't see Apple letting people develop apps for iPads and then recycling ostensibly the same code for some Sony gadget. It is not in their nature.

???? Obj-C was created by Brad Cox in the early 80s. Next licensed the trademark from StepStone. GCC has had an objective C compiler in it (as described by Cox) since the early 90s. As it is, the compiler used by Apple is the GCC compiler with some extra features such as properties (which have been released as gpl and are available for download from apples website). With the exception of trademarks and patents on an implementation, you can't own a language. Anyone can build a compiler for the same language

I don't see why. OpenStep has been around for a long time. Obviously they don't have all the same APIs for the UIKit that Apple has but a lot of code could be shared since they implement a lot of the same classes.

Apple don't have to do squat to prevent iPad apps form being "recycled" on a Sony gadget - there are more than enough differences that cannot easily be compensated between this Sony platform and iOS for this to even be a possibility. For example Sony will be using Cairo instead of Apple's Quartz, so any drawing code in an app will have to be rewritten. Also GNUstep does not implement UIKit at all. It doesn't even mimic AppKit all that well. And reverse engineering and achieving parity with either framework

It will be interesting to see if Apple respond to this and how. My feeling is that they might try and protect their assets and restrict developers' options. I haven't really thught this through but I just can't see Apple letting people develop apps for iPads and then recycling ostensibly the same code for some Sony gadget. It is not in their nature.

Why should Apple be worried? It enhances both ecosystems. People who want to develop for Sony's platform exclusively still need Objective-C developers, and those

It will be interesting to see if Apple respond to this and how. My feeling is that they might try and protect their assets and restrict developers' options. I haven't really thught this through but I just can't see Apple letting people develop apps for iPads and then recycling ostensibly the same code for some Sony gadget. It is not in their nature.

None of what you said makes any damned sense, but yah.. +1 interesting in the same way a crazy naked man screaming "the end of the world is near!" is I suppose.

BTW, the language & frameworks that iPad apps are built on is the same environment that most OS X apps are built on.

Not to say there shouldn't be any concerns, but Sony is a big boy with more lawyers than people reading this post...

If someone develops for a Sony gadget then it would be natural to port it over to Apple products which will increase their available apps.

Except by the time you are eligible to develop for Sony gadgets, you're expected to already have released an app for the iProducts. Plenty of existing Sony gadgets that run apps, such as PlayStation family products, appear to require all developers to be established companies, not individuals or small businesses.

This is more or less their philosophy. Look at their attempts to squash scripting languages, runtimes & browsers on iOS. There is absolutely zero technical reason for this, it's all to force developers to code to Apple's APIs. The last thing they want is for apps to become heterogenous so they do everything in their power to prevent that happening starting with making devs choose which platform to sink their efforts into.

Superficially this is a good strategy but things can easily swing the other way.

There is absolutely zero technical reason for this, it's all to force developers to code to Apple's APIs.

One technical reason for this is to make sure that everybody is on the same playing field when it comes to things like architecture changes.

If you know anything about Apple history, they have been able to make successful transitions between chipsets on more than one occasion. By requiring everybody to use the same development tools, any significant architecture changes are just a recompile away in an updated Xcode.

Just one of several reasons, along with UI consistency and performance amongst others, but one of the most important.

Indeed. I've worked with Objective-C on and off since the pre-OS X 'Rhapsody' days. It's almost like a cruel mix of coding, texting and writing documentation... all that plus a touch of COBOL's verbosity with a syntax/grammar nazi in its heart. After a while you just want to look a blank screen.

To be fair it's not that there's any inherent problem with Objective-C, that much is pretty well demonstrated by the countless great applications built on it for Apple's platforms. The real issue is really that it's like the neanderthal of languages- it evolved from C in parallel with languages like C++ and Java, but in doing so has ended up rather more ugly, and whilst it has some good bits, it also has bad bits like a lack of namespaces and operator overloading (although of course these issues aren't limited to Objective-C, Java lacks operator overloading too for example) but the combination of what is frankly a quite horrible syntax and these missing features means it's essentially just a poor man's C++. The obscurity of the syntax just builds an extra barrier that's really unnecessary in this day and age- every developer just about is comfortable with C++ style syntax so why waste time with a language syntax that's so obscure when you can just have one that people can jump straight into? This issue spills over into cross platform development somewhat in that it's much more of a headache to development multiple versions of a program when you're facing two very different sets of syntax more so than porting between programs with similar syntax.

So yeah, certainly it "works", but there's really just no point in it when other languages work just as well without the added headache of lack of things like namespaces and an obscure syntax. There are bigger issues with the development tools and libraries themselves, but really that's something else, my comment was really targetted at the language- effectively Objective-C is different without bringing anything worthwhile to the table- at least with some other languages that have more obscure syntax they also often have a redeeming feature, like say being a functional programming language for example.

Yes , I agree about the syntax. Instead of creating a nice consistent extension to the C language as Bjarn did with C++ (albeit with some kludges) , Obj-C really looks like someone tossed a completely different language into C because it was easier than making an effort to actually extend C nicely, and then didn't even bother to stir the resulting dogs dinner.

Yes , I agree about the syntax. Instead of creating a nice consistent extension to the C language as Bjarn did with C++ (albeit with some kludges) , Obj-C really looks like someone tossed a completely different language into C because it was easier than making an effort to actually extend C nicely, and then didn't even bother to stir the resulting dogs dinner.

I laughed at this post, but then I realized you might not be trying to be funny. As a C++ programmer myself, I've never heard anyone referring to C++ in a serious way as a "nice consistent extension to the C language." C++ is an absolute monster. It's completely inconsistent in many ways and is riddled with so many "gotchas" that it takes years until you should be able to call yourself an expert. That's a long time in the context of learning a new way to describe what a computer should do.

I haven't programmed in Objective-C in years, but I do remember that it is far simpler to learn than C++. It adds comparatively little to the C language, as far as syntax goes; basically just the [] message-passing construct and the @ keywords. I think Objective-C "2.0" may have distinguished itself a little more, but I haven't looked into it.

Anyway, hopefully you're being funny. Otherwise, we have completely different opinions. Objective-C seems to have extended C in a way that is much nicer and cleaner than C++ IMO.

But that's a completely different argument, his point is that C++ extends the C syntax and rules pretty consistently, whilst Objective-C does not, it changes them.

The complexity of C++ stems not from the syntax per-se, but simply because you can do that much more with it- not only have you got namespaces for better code organisation in large projects, not only have you got tools such as operator overloading, true multiple inheritance, but you also have options such as template meta-programming.

You found C++ harder simply because it has more features, and more complex features to learn, not because of it's syntax. C++'s complexity stems purely from it's power, Objective-C's complexity stems from it's obscure syntax- the former is the price you pay for extra features, the latter is just simply inexcusable difference for the sake of difference and/or poor language design.

C++'s syntax change complexity is purely down to the amount of syntax that is required to implement such a rich set of features. If you base your argument purely on syntax without any consideration of why that additional syntax is there and without any consideration of language changes then you might as well just argue Java trumps them both because it's much closer to C syntactically than either of them, but that would be ignorant of the fact Java offers a completely different featureset again.

Perhaps the most obvious test though is this, write an application that's not overly complex and uses the base set of shared features the languages provide using their preferred syntax (rather than the fact you can just use C for either) and which then more closely represents a C program syntactically? you really can't argue it's anything other than C++, which is precisely why the jump to C++ is much more natural than to Objective-C as per the GP's argument.

I think you have that backwards. Objective-C doesn't change any of the rules of C. On the other hand there's a lot of C syntax that is not valid C++.

Both C++ and Objective-C started off as object oriented extensions to C, and IMO Objective-C does a much better job. C++ tried to add everything and the kitchen sink, and ended up with horrible, bastardized syntax because it's still trying to achieve C compatibility, even though it hasn't been strictly compatible with C in over a decade.

It's even more noticeable if you look at what's considered "good" code in each language. The following is valid C, Obj-C and C++, but a C++ weenie will whine that it's not using std::cout.

I think the extent to which the syntax is a barrier to entry for new developers is exaggerated. Square brackets denote method calls - easy. It might take a wee while before typing out method declarations in the right order is second nature, but I think that's acceptable because you gain (forced) named parameters.

I like the fact that the syntax is different, because the chances of getting caught out are reduced. There are already too many languages with similar but subtly different syntaxes out there.

I agree it's not a big barrier, it's just an unnecessary inconvenience, that's the problem. I think the inconvenience alone puts a lot of people off of it because there are so many other languages out there that don't have that inconvenience for them.

Actually, it's the other way around, C++ is the poor mans objC. Unlike C++ it's a C superset, and way back with NeXT it was demonstrably leading to fewer bugs and less developer time on the same job. Apple has made some poor decisions in its role as de facto shepherd but the language is solid in its role.

You apparently do not really understand what Objective-C is about yet. Yeah, I know, "you don't know what you are talking about" is the classical ad hominem attack in any programming language flamewar. But in my opinion, it is hard to see how anyone who has actually taken the time to look at Objective-C closely could ever refer to it as being a "poor man's C++".

Now calling it a "poor man's Smalltalk", well, you might have a point there. But C++? ObjC and C++ are both in some way descended from C, but that is where the conceptual similarities end. The ObjC runtime is dynamic, which is IMHO a blessing, compared to the strict typing and template system of C++. But I'll grant you any day that Obj-C could do with some modernisation, in particular w/r to namespaces.

But even the other thing you mention, operator overloading... that is absent for a reason, simply because software design works differently in ObjC. You don't really need it in the same way that you do with C++. Same with multiple inheritance. You have protocols for that, amongst other things.

So please give ObjC another, more in-depth look, some time. You might be surprised in a positive way, once you look past the admittedly rather weird syntax.

But I'll grant you any day that Obj-C could do with some modernisation, in particular w/r to namespaces.

In the end namespaces are very little more than appending more characters on a name. You can get most of what namespaces do just by adding a unique string to part of your class name. Yes, there is a possibility for clashes if someone chooses a string which is the same as yours but how often do people use outside classes other than the ones in the Cocoa frameworks?

At best there should be some sort of prefix directory where developers can register their class prefixes and make sure that they have a unique string. Apple already uses NS and CF so most developers know do avoid using them.

You can do some pretty neat stuff like dynamically creating a class and adding methods to it. Some of it should only be used as a last resort but it's nice having the tools at hand if you really need them. This kind of stuff is either extremely difficult or outright impossible in C++.

Yes, there are some performance penalties to a dynamic runtime but for most cases it is negligible. If you desire you can circumvent the dynamic aspect of Objective-C and "freeze" method calls in order to get around those penalties for performance-critical code. There's a great series of articles on this subject: The Optimizing Objective C Series [mulle-kybernetik.com]

While your overall statement could be thought of as broadly correct and relevant, it does so by being a chimeric language where you have two completely different and unrelated syntactic forms (C and smalltalk) that are superimposed on each other. I personally feel this reduces overall legibility.

Another consideration is that since method calls are messages with signatures that are symbolically matched at runtime as each method is invoked, there is some runtime overhead in method calls that are very differe

For all the things Apple has done right and does well, clinging on to Objective-C is not one of them.

It'd be nice if you pointed out, you know, actual reasons rather than just make snide comments. I'm sure some knee-jerk Apple haters will vote you up though.

My issues with iOS development lie not with Objective-C, but with Apple's frameworks and libraries. It's frustrating to only have header files and not be able to check out what a method actually does when debugging. Fortunately, the documentation for their classes is top-notch. The objc runtime is also a pretty wild ride, but once you know your way around you can poke at it and find out where your messages are going at least. Can check out the source for the runtime here http://opensource.apple.com/source/objc4/ [apple.com]

Another issue of course, is XCode. I've switched to writing most of my iOS code in vim, building my code with the xcodebuild command. I still rely on XCode to do things like add files to the xcodeproj and manage the build configurations. XCode has a mind of its own, wacky completions, a completely fucked up undo buffer, strange locations for settings, and more frustrating joys. Would love to do away with that.

Not in my experience, eg: All the documentation presumes the developer is using IB when no serious developer I know will touch it.

You've never met a serious developer.

I've worked in Mac and iPhone application development for several years in industry and never met any developer (including collegues, online friends, people on the cocoa mailing lists, people on the developer forums, people at conferences), serious or not, who does not use IB.

No, but it does tend to come up fairly regularly. It's a reoccuring theme in #iphonedev/#macdev that a new programmer will come in saying "I'd prefer not to use IB because xyz", and every experienced programmer tells them to use it and learn it. Two weeks later, and they've joined the chorus of people saying "use IB". Similar themes repeat on the mailing lists.

"The world continues to chase apple -- probably for the better."
That's just flame bait, I wouldn't have glimpsed twice on this article had there been no such phrase... Yet, here I am now, reading the article, posting and trying to come up with something that will tease Apple fanbois, for the heck of it. This is why I come here every day;)

If Apple started using open source'd classes for things like strings and could focus their internal development on things that interact more directly with hardware (especially graphics), that would be a win for everyone.

Less money for them for common functionality, more ability for me to see what's causing a bug.

If Apple started using open source'd classes for things like strings and could focus their internal development on things that interact more directly with hardware (especially graphics), that would be a win for everyone.

1. Have a good look at all the open source stuff that you can download from Apple. You'll be surprised. Especially with string handling, Apple has always been one of the driving forces behind Unicode.
2. "Everyone" I think excludes Apples.

For selected values of "always". Apple has supported Unicode well since OS X, that is since 2001 or so, or in other words, ten years after the Unicode standard was published. Even Windows was earlier - Unicode support in Windows NT 3.x was there on the API level, in NT 4 it would work well if your programmers had been halfway diligent, and in Windows 2000 it would work well out of the box. With Apple systems before 2001, it was a pain to get Unicode working properly on MacOS 9 - it was technically supported

I had a difficult time moving from C++ to Objective-C. I think it would have been easier going straight from C to Objective-C. Old habits are hard to break. I thought I new OOP but it was learning Objective-C that really let it sink in.

I learned it as part of my Master's project, an iPhone application, for my graduate studies in Computer Science. I have since setup a Linux box specifically to code in Objective-C.

It really comes down to personal preference. Code in what language you like. Currently I prefer Objective-C.

It has been a few years since it migrated from a Linux fanboy-only site to a more democratic one. Today, you'll find Linux fanboys, Apple fanboys and surprise! Even Microsoft fanboys! But more importantly, you'll also find people impartial enough to not be fanboy to anything.

No, Cocoa is almost a superset of OpenStep (with the exception of a couple of classes like NSDataLink that Apple ditched). We (GNUstep) track the changes from Cocoa and have done for the last ten years. We also track changes from iOS. For example, we have NSRegularExpression, which is only in iOS Foundation, not yet in OS X Foundation.

C++ it like a swiss army knife with a multitude of razor-sharp blades and attachments. It can do whatever you want to do, and it can do it pretty cleverly, but if you don't know the tool really, really well, you're going to end up missing fingers:D

C++ it like a swiss army knife with a multitude of razor-sharp blades and attachments. It can do whatever you want to do, and it can do it pretty cleverly, but if you don't know the tool really, really well, you're going to end up missing fingers:D

Have you ever tried to actually do something with a Swiss army knife? Or any other knife with non-fixed blades? Sure, it's possible, but a bunch of special-purpose tools beat it hands-down every time. Which, I suppose, is a pretty good metaphor for C++:).

C++ is an incredibly powerful language but ObjC is also extremely capable. Cocoa (Touch) is simply the most productive framework that I have ever used. Yes, it has a pretty steep learning curve but once you get used to the Cocoa way of doing things you can produce excellent and rich GUI applications in a fraction of the time it takes in many other development environments that I've used.
I work mostly in C# in my day job too...

If you track so closely, technically what's to stop GNUStep / LLVM being used as a platform to host and run iOS apps? Potentially GNUStep + LLVM could even find its way into Android or similar and provide a means for people to run iPhone apps on non-iPhone platforms.

If you track so closely, technically what's to stop GNUStep / LLVM being used as a platform to host and run iOS apps?

The only thing stopping this is the Cocoa (Cocoa Touch in the case of iOS) frameworks. They are analogous to the C++ STL but they are not free to use outside of an iOS device. Yes, you could still use them to create a binary and possibly run it on another device but you run the risk of a huge lawsuit if you do that. The GNUStep frameworks are coming along nicely and they can be used as an open-source alternative but you won't be able to take an app programmed using the Cocoa frameworks and simply compile it against the GNUStep frameworks without doing some re-working.

Even with that you can still make an app that uses the classes common to both the Cocoa and GNUStep frameworks and then has some platform-specific code in critical sections, then compile that app against either framework to create a binary that can run on multiple platforms. There are a few apps that do this kind of thing now and I expect that Sony's choice will greatly increase the numbers. It's a good time to be an Objective-C programmer.

Objective-C has the most unreadable and unintuitive syntax of any language I've ever worked with, to say nothing of its memory management "best practices". What good do reference-counted pointers do me if I still have to manually release everything to avoid memory leaks? What good does its ability to mix C in with the Objective-C code do me when just mixing their two string types (NSString and char*) is a good way to make my program misbehave?

Objective-C has the most unreadable and unintuitive syntax of any language I've ever worked with

What are you talking about? The example you call insightful is very readable. As for intuitiveness, I don't think any language is truly intuitive, but once you learn it, it's very easy to understand, just like any other language. I suspect you are more of a "get off my lawn" type who thinks things should be done the way you learned them and anything different is to be feared.

to say nothing of its memory management "best practices". What good do reference-counted pointers do me if I still have to manually release everything to avoid memory leaks?

renew/release isn't very difficult to understand, but if you can't keep up, Objective-C has garbage collection.

What good does its ability to mix C in with the Objective-C code do me when just mixing their two string types (NSString and char*) is a good way to make my program misbehave?

What are you talking about? The example you call insightful is very readable.

It's the brackets and the "initWithThing:x otherThing:y" paradigm that I find unintuitive and difficult to read, most especially the "let's combine the method name with the name of its first parameter!" idea. Why did they throw out perfectly understandable function call syntax in favor of surrounding everything with brackets? I know they're trying to pretend they're sending "messages", but what they ended up with is virtually identical to the standard in C except in superficial syntax.

Why did they throw out C's perfectly readable struct-definition syntax in favor of this "@interface" and "@end" and "@property" nonsense?

Why do you have to manually derive all interfaces as children of NSObject? That would be like Java requiring you to explicitly derive every class from Object. You're never not going to want your class to be derived from NSObject, so it should be assumed.

Why do they use "+" and "-" for static methods vs instance methods? Did they really think "+" and "-" were more intuitively clear than, I don't know, using the 'static' keyword that was already in the language? Is it so absurd to want method specifiers that are actually clear in their meaning?

Why did they throw out perfectly understandable pass-by-value and pass-by-address parameter passing?

None of these changes from C are for the better.

I will say that #import is an improvement over #include; I wish something similar had been adopted in C++. Still, tiny improvements like this do not offset the idiocy with which the rest of Objective-C was designed.

I suspect you are more of a "get off my lawn" type who thinks things should be done the way you learned them and anything different is to be feared.

I have used languages with widely varying syntaxes and design philosophies (I enjoyed working with Scheme, for example). I don't "fear" different ways of doing things; I do have opinions about which ways of doing things are stupid. Having a negative opinion about a specific language you like does not automatically mean I'm just shaking my bony fist in the air and shouting "get off my lawn".

Let me make myself clearer: what bothers me most about Objective-C is that it tries to pretend it's like C even while doing everything it can to be different from C without being so different that it can't have the C in its name anymore, all while retaining several of C's disadvantages and gaining very few of the advantages it claims.

renew/release isn't very difficult to understand, but if you can't keep up, Objective-C has garbage collection.

No, it's not particularly difficult to understand, but that's not my point; Objective-C's garbage collection only collects objects whose reference counts are zero. That's the whole reason you have to properly handle your reference counting. In other words, Objective-C gives you all the downsides of being forced to manage memory, combined with all the downsides of garbage collection.

(I realize garbage collection has advantages; however, by forcing you to manually handle reference counting, Objective-C negates those benefits by design. In other words, all Objective-C gains you is that instead of freeing your memory at predictable times, the garbage collector will come along at unpredictable times and slow down whatever it is your program is doing.)

Objects != string pointers, and that's a problem for you? Seems like a fairly basic idea to grasp.

It's not that, it's that nothing in Objective-C even works with char*s, other than the one init method on NSString. Want to display a char* in your UI? Hope you don't mind converting it to NSString first!

Worse, by default, string constants in your code are char*s, not NSStrings! If you want your string constant to be an NSSt

I agree with some of your points (and don't much like Obj-C as a language), but others are incorrect.

Why do you have to manually derive all interfaces as children of NSObject? That would be like Java requiring you to explicitly derive every class from Object. You're never not going to want your class to be derived from NSObject, so it should be assumed.

You're only going to derive from NSObject when you're writing for Cocoa; it's not a magic base root class that's inherent to the language like java.lang.Object is in Java. It is perfectly possible to use Obj-C with something other than Cocoa, and then you'd have your own root class different from NSObject.

more intuitively clear than, I don't know, using the 'static' keyword that was already in the language? Is it so absurd to want method specifiers that are actually clear in their meaning?

There's actually nothing particularly clear about the use of "static" modifier to mean class methods. Th

You could argue that but considering that no language remotely related to C has string as a primitive, you'd be very alone. For the most part, true primitives are only included in a few languages. Smalltalk which most OOP languages are derived considers primitives as objects. Java is one of the few languages that has true primitives, and not even Java has string as a primitive. Strings are objects in Java. The most serious problem with strings as primitives is that strings do not have a fixed size. Tr

The proprietary "do-whatever-you-please-with-it"-license still exists for Qt. The license is on per developer/per year-basis. Note the absence of handsets in the previous sentence. A company can do anything with the toolkit and not release anything back to the community with the proprietary license. Not that I can think of any reason to do - Qt Quick/QML seems great, and one will be able to achieve a lot easily without modifying the toolkit - which is LGPL, so your $KILLER_APP can be very much proprietary.

I'm sorry, I don't understand what you're getting at. Sony Ericsson (and many other handset vendors) use Android, without having to pay anything to Google. Similarly they could use Qt, and not pay Nokia a dime. Yes, many handset vendors build proprietary UIs on top of Android, but they do so without modifying the core platform. What's stopping them from doing the same with Qt? The framework itself is more than comprehensive for all kinds of things, and LPGL certainly doesn't preclude proprietary UIs.

Actually, Objective-C's performance is very very good, and verbosity is absolutely a good thing. The problems I might raise with objective-c would involve it's highly dynamic nature, and lack of a decent type system, not it's implementation's speed or it's code clarity, which are both positive advantages for it!

Cocoa is also one of the absolute cleanest application development frameworks out there by far (CocoaTouch improves on it a chunk though purely by binning a lot of old cruft), so I'd say sony made a bloody good choice.

As others have mentioned in the comments, Objective-C was one of Apple's poorer decisions

I suppose you have a significantly better (simpler and more flexible) compiled OO language suitable for system-level programming up your sleeve, when you talk like that.

I like the D programming language. It's relatively new, but its well designed and multi-paradigm. It's suitable for system-level programming, but still supports higher-lever programming methods such as OO and functional programming.

If you're *starting* a new project, D might be an option, but the GGP's assertion was that Objective-C was a mistake that Apple made.

According to Wikipedia, D first appeared in 1999, long after Apple acquired NeXT and its Objective-C based OS which was the foundation for Mac OS X. iOS is based on OSX, so it follows that they'd re-use the core parts rather than re-write it from scratch and have to maintain two distinct OS programming skillsets, if a different language didn't provide substantial benefits over

I think a lot of people who dislike Objective-C are those who just looked it over and haven't spent too much time with it. I used to feel the same way until I got most of the way through an iPhone app recently. I view it as an acquired taste. Watching the great WWDC videos that Apple provides on it's development site helped me to understand it a lot and learn why they do the things they do with it.

I suppose you have a significantly better (simpler and more flexible) compiled OO language suitable for system-level programming up your sleeve, when you talk like that.

Yes. It's called C++. Which is significantly better than ObjC, and almost as simple and flexible.

And before you say anything, consider the fact that BeOS was largely programmed in C++. If the most flexible, fastest and most responsive multimedia operating system ever produced is not a testament to C++'s power, I don't know what it is.

None of them can work with C code so directly as Objective-C, which is a very large advantage indeed for systems programming, and a decent advantage for other forms of programming too (like being able to use something like a blowfish library with almost no work).

Now that Objective-C has closures, I'm not sure I really see that great a benefit of any of those languages over the drawbacks.

If you like a LISP syntax, consider Nu [programming.nu] which is an S-exp based variant of Obje

Claiming Objective-C is "familiar to far more programmers" is a stretch at best. I'm a C/C++ programmer, and I've been working with Java for a long while now, but I still find Objective-C's "messaging" syntax and its idiotic class definition syntax to be unintuitive and nigh-unreadable, despite the language's C-like appearance much of the time.

Seriously, what idiot decided "+" and "-" are better choices for distinguishing between class methods and instance method than using C's existing "static" keyword fo

This makes total sense - Sony are very similar to Apple in that they lock their systems down and actively prevent after-market modifications. For these reasons, there was no way Sony were going to go down an Android-esque / Java route, so mimicking Apple was the logical choice.

did this just came out of your arse or what? do you think that using java instead objective-c/gnustep will prevent Sony or anyone from locking down the system, or even better do you think that using objective c like Apple will automagically lock down the system?
Oh and by the way Sony Ericsson use android for their phones, and there is some speculation that they will use android 3.0 for the playstation phone